The press office of Gov. Pat McCrory sent out a press release Thursday touting the news that Pepsi was building a new distribution center and creating 50 jobs in the state over the next five years and proclaiming that the announcement “will continue to strengthen North Carolina’s position as one of the fastest growing economies in the nation.”

Any new jobs are welcome in the state of course but the announcement comes just three days after McCrory’s Commerce Secretary John Skvarla bizarrely claimed that the economic damage from McCrory’s HB2 “hadn’t moved the needle one iota” even though the anti-LGBT law has cost the state thousands of jobs and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Skvarla even brushed off the decision by PayPal last spring to cancel a planned operations center in Charlotte that would have created 400 jobs in the area as a “grain of sand on the beach.”

So if you are keeping score at home, 50 jobs strengthen North Carolina’s economy, but 400 jobs is only a grain of sand.

The day after Skvarla offered his silly HB2 commentary, the real estate research firm CoStar Group announced it was choosing Richmond over Charlotte for a 730-job expansion project because of HB2.

The only sand involved here is where McCrory and Skvarla have buried their heads while the state economy continues to suffer from the discriminatory law McCrory signed and stubbornly continues to defend.